by Deck Davis
So, when a voice said to him, “It is time for you to die,” he broke down.
A bitter yet sickening happiness flooded him. He cried tears of the sourest joy. An end to it, finally. Time to die. Time for the agony to finish. Even if they wouldn’t tell him why, at least they’d give him death.
They couldn’t hurt him anymore in death.
“He’s about to croak,” said a voice. “His pulse is slower than a legless cat crawling through mud.”
“Then send him on his way. I have an appointment with the barber at twelve, and I missed the last one. I hate it when my hair grows over my ears.”
A robed man held a dagger to his throat and cut him, each inch of the arc spreading pain through his flesh, and his life webbed away, and finally, finally, he was free from their torment.
He drifted into the sleep of death, where pain couldn’t touch him anymore.
And then he woke up.
They were standing in front of him in their robes. It was nighttime now, his fifth in that crypt by his count, but it was impossible to say how accurate that was.
“You…you promised. You said you’d kill me.”
“And I always keep a promise.”
“But why am I…”
“You might have straw for brains, but surely you have heard of necromancy?” said the voice.
He had, and it sent a chill through him so violently that he wanted to be sick.
“If only death were the escape that you’d hoped,” said the robed person. “But alas; sometimes, it is a new beginning.” Then he turned to the others. “Start on his legs next, but keep his skin intact. Don’t tear the tattoos.”
He knew what they’d done, now. They’d given him the death he had begged them for, only to bring him back with their arts.
They’d brought him back so they could begin his torture afresh.
It didn’t begin straight away, though. They tended him as well as they could; set bones, cleaned wounds and let them heal, applied a salve to his raw flesh where they had stripped away his skin. One of them must have been a healing mage, because there was no alchemy in the land that should have been able to keep him alive and free from infection.
One of them, a woman who never took the hood down from her head, even spoke to him in tender whispers as she cleaned him.
She squeezed his shoulder when he sobbed, and she read a story to him; The Shadow of the Endless Night. It was a story he knew well, because it was from a collection called The Scarlett Tales, and his mother used to read it to him.
They didn’t just repair his body; they repaired his mind, too. The others talked with him then, and they were kind. Their conversations were all fluff; they told him nothing of himself, nor did they ask about his life.
They gave him hope, though. They dangled the possibility of escape; that maybe if he paid them, if he agreed to tell nobody about this, he could go.
“If we let you run back to your family, can we trust you to keep your word?” said one.
“I promise!”
“I believe you.”
Relief flooded through him, reaching the sliver of his mind untouched by pain.
Maybe now that they’d tortured him, killed him, and brought him back, they were done.
Then, just as he began to believe he might see Lorraine and Tommy again, they took out their knives and their whips and their hooks and they set upon him again.
CHAPTER 2
It was sign that a problem was bad when Jakub would rather face a clan of swampgators than face the issue itself.
Then again, the swampgators might have been all hide and bone and teeth, but luckily the academy swampgators were tame. Having lived in the academy grounds for centuries now, each successive generation became less hostile than the next.
Groundsman Nipper came out to feed them every two days, and he was so comfortable around them that it wasn’t unusual to see him get on the ground and wrestle with them.
Today, though, the swampgators were making a hell of a noise. It sounded like wind wheezing out of a torn bagpipe.
“Something’s got them agitated,” said Ludwig, Jakub’s demonic hound.
“Don’t pay them any attention. Nipper says they’ve lived around the academy so long they don’t even notice we’re here.”
“No, they’re crowding around something. What is it…no! Jakub, it’s one of their young. It’s dead.”
The gators were in a circle. Eight of them, the older ones with worn scales and pale eyes, the younger ones leaner and swishing their tails. In the center there was a little gator the size of Jakub’s palm. If it had been alive, it would have been cute.
“Poor thing,” he said.
“Lucky we have a necromancer here.”
“No, Lud. Irvine will shit a pile of rocks. I have to get permission to resurrect anything on academy grounds. If I wanted to bring back a fly I’d have to finish enough paperwork to wipe out a forest.”
“Have a heart,” said Ludwig.
“The day of my inquiry isn’t the day to start breaking rules.”
“Look at them. They’re grieving for it…”
“Damn it,” said Jakub. “You’ve got that annoying ability to pull on my heart strings, you know that? You’re like an emotional puppet master. Keep your floppy ears open and tell me if you sense anyone coming.”
He took his soul necklace from underneath his shirt. Good – it was three-quarters blue, which meant he had enough soul essence. He’d taken the essence from a dead deer that groundsman Nipper had found in the woods. It had succumbed to blight rot so there was no question of bringing it back, but at least in death its essence would help the baby swampgator.
He pressed his thumb tattoo and let his spell list appear in front of him.
Jakub Russo
Necromancer
Rank: Novice Lvl 3
[IIIII ]
Glyphline 1: Soul Harvest
Essence Grab [2]
Draw soul essence from the dead for use in necromancy.
Health Harvest [2]
Convert soul essence into a healing wind.
Glyphline 2: Resurrection
Minor Creature Resurrection [1]
Resurrect small animals
Last Rites [2]
View the last few minutes of a corpse’s life
Death Puppet [1]
Temporarily re-animate a corpse and step into it
Glyphline 3: Death Bind
Summon Bound [2]
Summon your bound animal from the Greylands
He spoke the spellword of Minor Creature Resurrection and let soul essence drift from his necklace and over to the gator. The other beasts shuffled back when they saw the mist, and the younger ones snapped at it while the older gators just watched, blinking their slit eyes.
*Necromancy EXP Gained!*
[IIIIIIII ]
The baby gator stirred. It flicked out one leg, then another, and then it stood and looked at its family.
The gators greeted it with their own sounds, happy ones this time, and Jakub couldn’t help smiling as he saw the joy spread from gator to gator.
“Doesn’t it feel good to do something nice?” said Ludwig.
Jakub wasn’t sure that it did. He knew right from wrong, and he always hoped that in the times he needed to listen to his heart, it’d tell him to do the right things.
But when he actually did something good, he didn’t feel a glow. Now, using his necromancy to bring the gator back, he hadn’t taken anything from it himself.
Did that make him cold, or just practical?
“Kortho says having a big heart gets you into trouble if you listen to it too much. Maybe he’s got a point,” he said.
“Better than not having one. Should we head back to the academy?”
“It’s not time yet,” said Jakub.
The academy building was way behind them, and Jakub was keeping it that way for now. Thickets of shrubs and trees covered their left, blocking the mana and sword traini
ng fields from view. To their right was the Path of the Returning, which was the road that graduates took when returning from field assignments completed in the name of the academy and the queen.
They didn’t always return alive, either.
“Let’s run through it again. Be harsher this time,” said Jakub. “Irvine is going to grill me like I’m a fat rump steak.”
Ludwig prowled in front of him with his tail swishing, just happy to be on the surface instead of in the Greylands, the world between life and death. On his last assignment, Jakub had levelled his Summon Bound spell from [1] to [2], and with this, Ludwig’s form had changed. It was still spectral in its blue haze, but the ghostliness was dulled a little, and parts of him looked real.
Another level or two and who knew, maybe he’d be indistinguishable from a real dog.
“I’m being as harsh as I can. It doesn’t come easily to me,” said Ludwig.
“This isn’t tea time with besties, Lud. They’re going to tear me apart in there. They’ll try to put all the blame for failing on me.”
“They’re academy instructors. They aren’t out to get you.”
“When you graduate by the skin of your teeth, it’s wise not to completely mess up your first assignment. They’re going to put the heat on me like a hog over a fire, and it’ll be instructor Irvine turning the spit. Come on; pretend you’re him.”
“So, Novice Russo,” said Ludwig. “Are you so incompetent, so moron-brained, that you can’t finish a simple task?”
“Woah, Lud. Are you being Irvine there, or yourself?”
“Too harsh?”
“Tone it down a little.”
Ludwig cleared his throat. “Can you tell me why you didn’t recover the body of the traitor? Furthermore, please explain how a master necromancer received a fatal wound while in your presence?”
Good questions, and ones he was sure to get asked by the panel of instructors. So, what was he going to say? He either stuck with the truth, or gave a version of it. The truth with a perfumed twist.
The trouble was, he wasn’t much of a liar.
Jakub tried for an answer, but he struggled to order it into a coherent narrative.
“Saying it in my head is one thing,” he said, “but why do words always get jumbled up when you speak them out loud?”
“It’s only me here. If you can’t say it to me…”
“They say your conscience acts out when you’re going against it, don’t they? Maybe the version I’m giving is too much of an excuse. Maybe my conscience wants me to take more of the blame.”
“Keep calm, and tell the truth.”
“Let’s run through it again.”
“Maybe we should leave it, Jakub. A person can sound like they’re lying when their story is too rehearsed. People telling the truth don’t need to memorize what happened.”
“Some instructors have a way of making the truth sound false, even in your own head. Especially one who has hated my guts since I got here. Irvine has been looking for an excuse, and unless I can tell things the right way today, he’s gonna get it.”
“The academy is too poor to keep you away from field work for long. It must cost a fortune to train up a necromancer until he’s ready for assignments,” said Ludwig.
“It costs even more to tolerate failure. I wouldn’t put it past them to take a hit so they can prove a point to the other graduates. Well, if I’m gonna be sweeping academy floors this time next year, at least I’ll make ‘em the cleanest they’ve ever been.”
“Keep calm, tell the truth, and you’ll get your next field assignment before you know it. I hope it’s somewhere nicer next time.”
Hopefully Ludwig was right, but his hound didn’t just wear rose-tinted glasses; his eyeballs were drenched in the pink hue. To him, the world was a place of wonder, where bad things rarely happened.
Jakub knew the realities of the academy. He’d graduated as a necromancer by the narrowest of margins, and even then only after Master Kortho had spoken up for him. Failing his first field mission gave the instructors who wanted him out enough reason to cast doubt.
Not only had Kortho saved Jakub from his family years ago, then later spoke against the other instructors to persuade them to let him graduate, but he was going to help today, too. Kortho’s testimony about their assignment, coupled with Jakub keeping a clear head, should be enough to get him through this.
He just needed to concentrate in the inquiry when they asked him questions, to have nothing on his mind except what they asked him.
“Lud, if the world had your optimism…it’d be a little too nice, actually. Okay, ask me again. Do it in Irvine’s voice.”
“Novice Russo, can you explain why…”
Jakub missed the rest of Ludwig’s sentence, because there was activity at the bottom of the Path of Returning. Two mana wagons pulled up by the gates, one hurtling forward so quickly that when it stopped, the driver on the front flew off and hit the ground.
“Mana wagons?” said Jakub. “The academy would never pay for that.”
“Something’s happened. Warlocks, three of them. See?”
Warlocks. Jakub’s ex-girlfriend, Abbie, was a warlock, and she gone on her first field assignment the same time as him.
He’d broken things off with her before they left, going by the academy credence of duty above self, duty above love, duty above all. He knew that was bullshit now after his first assignment, and he was beginning to regret ending it with her.
It was a funny thing, when two sides of your own head spun their own stories. One side saying your decision made sense, the other calling it absolutely gods-damned stupid. His brain’s self-protection instinct was strong enough to try and convince him that finishing a relationship with a beautiful, clever, tough-as-hell warlock girl was a good idea.
He’d tried to believe it, but he was learning that mistakes tend to creep up on a person inch by inch, like weeds across a lawn. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a heart; he still cared about her.
“Can we go and see Abbie?” said Ludwig. “For a minute? A second?”
“I can’t have her on my mind today, Lud. The inquiry is in less than an hour. I haven’t seen her in weeks and if I see her today, she’s all I’m gonna think about.”
It was one thing saying the words, another believing them. The clue to how he really felt was apparent in how he couldn’t seem to tear his attention away from the gates, where the warlocks were rushing through and toward the academy.
A part of his brain told him to forget Abbie, but another told him that was impossible. He wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t bring himself not to look.
The truth was that as much as he’d dreaded doing it, breaking things off with Abbie had been the easy part. What came after was a series of regrets that flared whenever he saw her.
Did I do the right thing?
She’s so nice, she took the breakup so well. Have I made a giant mistake?
He’d glance look long enough to catch sight of her. Just to see her blonde hair, see how she looked in her warlock armor. A tiny peek, and then he’d forget about her.
Wait. The warlocks were really running now, and one of them had a body slung over his shoulder.
Jakub recognized him as Mason D’Angelt, a master Warlock. He wasn’t a full academy instructor, because he refused to teach classes, and he had a reputation for enjoying some of the more unsavory aspects of Dispolis, the nearby capital city of the Red Eye Queendom. That wasn’t a good example for the academy to set.
But warlocks were difficult to find, ones who attained mastery even more so, and Mason had a contractor’s agreement with the academy where he’d let some of their novices go on field assignments with him.
Now, Mason was sprinting over the Path of Returning with a body over his shoulder. It was a woman, her body completely limp, so much so that every time Mason took a step, her head smashed into his back muscles.
“Jakub,” said Ludwig, “That’s-”
He
didn’t need Ludwig to tell him; he’d already seen who it was.
CHAPTER 3
Two more warlocks – an instructor and a novice – and the mana wagon drivers followed Mason up the Path of Returning. One driver limped and had a bruised eye from being flung off the wagon, and the other driver looked worried.
Jakub joined up with them, struggling to keep pace.
“What happened?”
“We need to get the girl to the necromancers,” said instructor Gascon. He was a warlock too, but he was the opposite of Mason; where Mason was all muscle and brawn and seemed to use his warlock powers to search for trouble, Instructor Gascon was a slight man who you’d usually find in the Grand Library, always searching for another aspect of his craft that he hadn’t discovered yet.
“I’m a necromancer,” said Jakub.
“Can you resurrect a person, novice?”
“Get out of our way, Jakub,” said Bendie, a novice warlock.
While Jakub’s chest ached from the sprint, Bendie had caught them up with ease and even Instructor Gascon, thirty years Jakub’s senior, seemed fine. That came down to their conditioning, he guessed. While necromancers only needed basic physical fitness, warlocks trained to get themselves in peak shape.
He pushed the fatigue back and forced himself to keep up. He had to know what had happened.
Whatever Abbie’s first assignment had been, it must have been dangerous for two novices and two masters to go together.
Abbie had paid the price for it, and Jakub couldn’t look at her head smashing against Mason’s back without a flare of fear lighting in him. What the hell has happened to her?
His thoughts stoked the fears and added a helping of guilt; this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t ended things.
Not only was the thought wrong, since Abbie had gone out on a field assignment - and instructors generally didn’t base their assignments on a student’s love life – but it was selfish, too. What, did he think that everything in the universe happened as a result of his own actions?
